Bam Bam, whose real name is a mystery, was the teenage drummer for J.F.A. (Jodie Foster`s Army), a hard-core punk rock band from Phoenix known for its own line of Hobie skateboards and for ``Cokes and Snickers,`` a suburban ode to junk food.

The year: 1984. The event: My first brush with a dude.

Now Bam wasn`t exactly the Ferdinand Magellan of dudedom, but while Pauly Shore, Wayne Campbell and Bill S. Preston were still watching ``Romper Room,`` Bam was wearing his baggy, knee-length shorts, riding his board up the slopes of empty swimming pools and sounding like Sean Penn`s Jeff Spicoli from ``Fast Times at Ridgemont High.``

Seven years after that meeting of the mindless, we`re in the middle of one major dude boom, an explosion of the most humongous proportions. Need proof? Just take a gander at movie theater marquees, grocery store shelves and CD store bins:

- ``Bill and Ted`s Bogus Journey,`` the sequel to the 1989 surprise hit

``Bill and Ted`s Excellent Adventure,`` is the main force in the summer`s dude tsunami. Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves reprise their roles as a couple of head-banging San Dimas, Calif., dudes whose credo is ``be excellent to each other.`` Their popularity has led to a Saturday morning cartoon, a breakfast cereal and an upcoming live action series.

- Comedian/MTV host Pauly Shore has become one of the most popular slurring heads on the video network. He also has an album out and has coined the term ``Lisa,`` which is Paulyspeak for ``babe,`` which is dudespeak for

``one mighty attractive woman.``

- Wayne Campbell and his drummer compadre Garth (Mike Myers and Dana Carvey) from the ``Wayne`s World`` segment on ``Saturday Night Live`` will hit the big screen in a ``Wayne`s World`` feature. Penelope Spheeris, who filmed Megadeth and Poison in ``Decline of Western Civilization, Part II: The Metal Years,`` will direct. ``Wayne`s World`` greeting cards were recently introduced by those egregious merchandisers from ``SNL.``

- The tattooed school bus driver from ``The Simpsons,`` whom young Bart looks up to, is animation`s answer to dudedom. In one episode, he tried to reassure Bart that flunking the 4th grade wasn`t all that bad. The driver himself was left back twice. ``Now look at me,`` he says to an admiring Bart. - The McDude, the Valley guy who looks like Extreme guitarist Nuno Bettencourt, was last seen hawking fries on MTV and the USA Cable Network in McDonald`s commercials.

- And is it any concidence that one of the summer`s biggest movies,

``City Slickers,`` is about three New Yorkers who on their vacation go to a dude ranch?

Like anthropologists disputing the origins of civilization, dudologists can`t agree on the origins of the dude. Some mistake Marlon Brando`s motorcycle tough in the ``Wild Ones`` as the proto-dude. Dean Martin`s character in the 1959 John Wayne vehicle ``Rio Bravo`` was named Dude, one fringe group theorizes.

Still, there are those who believe that James Darren`s Moondoggie character from the ``Gidget`` movies was a dude.

Most experts point to Spicoli, the zonked-out surfer credited with originating the phrases ``Hey bud! Let`s party`` and ``bogus.``

But SoCal-dude lingo for Southern California-folks in the know consider the dude to be the male variation of the Valley Girl. And sure as Aerosmith recorded the theme to ``Wayne`s World,`` everyone in the San Fernando Valley knows that the Galleria in Sherman Oaks, the setting for much of ``Fast Times at Ridgemont High,`` is the quintessential dude/Valley Girl frolic zone.

But enough of these hypotheses. Let`s consult academia.

The Random House dictionary says that a dude (1880-85, Amer.; orig. uncert.) is a nattily dressed gent or an urban Easterner who vacations on a ranch. They obviously haven`t seen Pauly Shore interviewing Gerardo.

New York Times wordmeister William Safire in 1984 wrote that the word

``dude`` is a hailing ``favored by many blacks,`` kind of like ``bubba.``

Tommy Christ, the lead singer of the Long Island alternative rock band Scatterbrain, wrote ``Don`t Call Me Dude`` after growing tired of hearing the word used by every Tom, Dick and Axel. When asked to define ``dude,`` Christ struggled.

``I`m not quite sure what one is,`` he explained. ``It`s a generic word and it`s way overused and way annoying.

``And the song backfired. Since I wrote `Don`t Call Me Dude,` 10 times as many people call me dude as they did before.``

All this abundance of dude verbiage and mass production begs at least one question: How will the greeting cards, the television programs or Bill and Ted`s Excellent Cereal affect the evolution of the dude?

Patrick Farrell, manager of corporate information for Ralston Purina in St. Louis, was asked what sort of impact his company`s Bill and Ted cereal would have in the dude movement.

``I`m really not good at this,`` he said. ``I`m more of a corporate type.``

And what next? Maybe a ``Wayne`s World`` line of clothes from Urban Streetwear.

Or a series of Bill and Ted movies like ``Bill and Ted Sell Amway,``

``Bill and Ted Versus Gidrha, the Three-Headed Monster,`` ``Bill and Ted and Carol and Alice`` or ``Bill and Ted and the Space Trollops From the Planet Xorbitol.``

Perhaps a Pauly Shore translation booklet that explains the nuances to such phrases as ``If you don`t let us grind some major chow I`ll tweek your melon, you trolly little weasel.`` (Translation: Give us food or I`ll punch you in the head, you greasy little nerd.)

Shore predicted in Surfer magazine that ``we`re not too far from the day you`ll be able to take your driver`s test in English, Spanish or Dude. Instead of true or false, the choices will be `totally` or `not even.` ``